BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Elaine Freedgood,
The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel.

Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006.
196 pp. ISBN 0226261553.

Reviewed by Daniel Nisa Cáceres
Universidad de Sevilla

In The Ideas in Things, Elaine Freedgood proposes a stimulating
way of reading "things"; that is, of apprehending elusive,
absent or overlooked meanings and ideas long stored in objects. This
substantial study is situated within the growing interdisciplinary field
of object studies, known as "thing theory," but aims to open
new horizons. Thing theory, broadly speaking, develops approaches to
fill the notionally perceived breach between things and human beings.
In A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature
(2003) Bill Brown, for instance, seeks to explore objects and their
relationship to ideas in late nineteenth-century U.S. fiction by utilizing
the marginal logic of subjectivity -- the uniqueness of personal experience,
the attachments and emotions that mark the bonds between people and
things. Whereas Brown departs somewhat from the perspective afforded
by a focus on commodity culture in order to foreground the subjective
dimension of those bonds, Freedgood's frame of reference in The Ideas
in Things is still very much that of New Historicism. Yet instead
of reading texts by treating them merely as encoded receptacles of cultural
materialism and capitalism, she traces the social histories that lie
within seemingly unimportant objects of consumption as evoked and represented
in three mid-Victorian novels: Jane Eyre, Mary Barton
and Great Expectations.

Through this exploration of the ideas in things, Freedgood makes an
enlightening contribution to the practical applicability of thing theory
by advancing an innovative reading method. In the first three chapters,
she retrieves the cultural, historical, social and material qualities
of some manufactured goods. Following Brown in The Material Unconscious
(1996), she carries out a "strong metonymic" reading (142)
by taking a literary thing literally and relying on "mediations"
-- "those of historians of textiles and tobacco, of forestry and
furniture" (5) -- that can illuminate its past. Thus she avoids
"the routinized literary figuration that precludes the interpretation
of most things of realism" (5) -- such as pieces of furniture,
drapery or tobacco, which are not "indentured to a metaphorical
relation in which they must give up most of their qualities in the service
of a symbolic relation" (10). This is what Freedgood labels conventional
or "weak" metonymic reading, in which objects only "suggest,
or reinforce, something we already know about the subjects who use them"
(2). Instead, her methodological approach is built on Walter Benjamin's
description of the "protocols of the collector" (2) and seeks
to delay the construction of metaphors and allegories until the vision
and knowledge of the collector have been acquired (4). In the monographic
volume of Critical Inquiry (28.1) given over to thing theory,
Bill Brown states that "we look through objects (to see
what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture -- above
all, what they disclose about us)," but hardly see the things
themselves (4). Freedgood sets out to justify an alternative or solution
in the form of a necessary material investigation "beyond the immediate
context in which they [things] appear"; then the things are returned
"to their novelistic homes" with a fresh and legitimate "resonance
of meaning" (5-6).

The introductory chapter, "Reading Things," aptly summarizes
the contents and establishes the theoretical ground for Freedgood's
text. Roland Barthes's definition of the "'reality effect'"
produced by "many objects in the realist novel" (9) is crucial
for Freedgood's use of metonymy and narrative theory. For her, this
neglected trope might solve a common conflict in literary criticism;
namely, the fact that the "object as reality effect loses its potential
as a material thing outside the conventions of representation,"
and "as metaphor loses most of its qualities in its symbolic servitude"
(11). Bill Brown's strong metonymic reading in The Material Unconscious
starts from Barthes's ideas, but allows for "causal, material,
and conceptual connections beyond the covers of the text, or outside
the frame of the narrative" (11). In the second section, Freedgood
examines the conventional and contingent aspects of metonymy and demonstrates
how her strong, literalizing approach can transcend these limitations
(12-17). Next, Freedgood takes into account the fact that readers have
to face the circumstantial evidence provided by the novels -- i.e. what
can be interpreted and assumed as such by them; yet, given the "extent
to which history and convention govern that category" (21), she
proposes that novelistic objects should first be taken "literally"
in order to "understand them as interpretable" (20). In the
following section, she examines the possibilities for making legitimate
interpretations out of the "vagrant processes of what might be
called the metonymic imagination," which is described -- with reference
to Barthes and Derrida -- as the "cognitive motor of the reading
process" (21). In light of Giambattista Vico's ideas on the material
foundation of language, Freedgood argues that cultural knowledge is
stored in a "variety of institutional forms," but more relevantly
"at the level of the word" (23). Finally, the interpretive
legitimacy of words leads to the nature of hieroglyphics and Marx's
theory of exchange, in which "the commodity fetish is a social
hieroglyphic" (26). For Freedgood, the "commodity is both
a material object and a trope" (27); therefore, "[h]ieroglyphics,
commodities, [and] fictional objects" have to be taken both literally
and figurally" (28) to achieve a well-balanced interpretation.

Each of the following three chapters centers on a canonical Victorian
novel and a particular object virtually unexplored by scholarship, despite
the object's distinct evocation of industrial and imperial overtones.
These "things of realism," according to Freedgood, amount
to "a nearly infinite catalogue of compressed references to social
facts that have, in the history of novel reading, remained largely unread"
(84). Her choice of "unread" things is "influenced by
structures of thought and thinking which derive from a line of thinking
that could be traced from" Marxist criticism, the work of Edward
Said and postcolonial studies, and the writings of Freud, Foucault,
and Judith Butler (5). From their angle of vision, things are not quite
relevant to the structural logic of the text, but rather point to the
context where they were manufactured; special emphasis is thus placed
on the social histories surrounding the object. However, for an object
to be either metaphorical or a part of the "referential illusion"
of realism, it must lose most of its specific qualities as such, its
own historical links included; metonymy -- for Freedgood -- reconciles
both processes with its essence (10): an object can be itself, as well
as a metaphor and a fraction of what signifies the real in the text.

In the first chapter, "Souvenirs of Sadism," Freedgood analyzes
how the histories of slavery, deforestation and enclosure internalized
by pieces of old mahogany furniture in Charlotte Brontë's Jane
Eyre are disavowed, which explains to a great extent why they have
passed unnoticed. She argues that the politically incorrect meaning
of Jane Eyre's refurbishment of Moor House and Ferndean, in terms of
the topical moral response to the social relations of consumption and
production inherent in the furniture, is secreted and repressed. This
is the case of "the deforestation, colonization, and implementation
of plantation slavery in the two critical sources of wealth in the novel,
Madeira and the Caribbean," islands from which a large amount of
this wood and the furniture made of it was imported between 1720 and
1760, known as the "age of mahogany" (32). Freedgood comments
on how the novel stresses both the destruction of the furniture in Thornfield
Hall and the "'uninhabited and unfurnished'" state of Ferndean,
which "invites the exercise of habitation as a demonstration of
power" (33). Freedgood suggests that for Jane the "symbolic
compression of violence" in this type of furniture is a source
"from which to draw consolation and a sense of power" (35),
rather than anxiety. Imperialism provides the novel with a sadistic
narrative of selfhood in which "subjection, first of the self and
then of others, makes for subjecthood" (44-45). Close attention
is also paid to the politics of power as held by Jane -- who "decorates,
but [ . . . ] refuses to be decorated" by disavowing and maintaining
"mastery behind a screen of cunningly convincing abjection"
(48); to the metonymy of mastery expressed by the profits made by the
importation of Madeira wine (49-50); and to the return to a pastoral,
domestic condition both of Ferndean and the Caribbean islands, which
are ultimately transformed by the tourist industry from mid-nineteenth
century onward (52-53). In short, as Freedgood points out, "Jane
Eyre has been widely discussed as a text of empire," but not
from the perspective offered by "interior decoration" (31).

In Chapter Two, "Coziness and Its Vicissitudes," the focus
is on the checked English calico curtains which Elizabeth Gaskell puts
up in Mary Barton's house. Stepping over the threshold of their traditionally
metonymic and ideologically comforting function -- i.e. to convey order
and coziness -- Freedgood gradually extracts the evasive social, national
and cultural significance of calico as a recipient of troubling histories
of the cotton industry and the social relations of production, as well
as a "definite boundary between the domestic and the foreign"
(57) in the narrative. In order to suggest how ideas are present in
things, Freedgood first examines the etymologically related meaning
of "fustian" and "bombast": they refer simultaneously
to a kind of "overblown language" and cotton (more concretely
a manufactured textile and raw cotton, respectively) (55). Once the
object has been literalized, she investigates the social history of
calico -- fustian "made from cotton exclusively" (55), how
from "a luxury import, [it] becomes in its British incarnation
a low-price and utilitarian textile" (57). Given that blue and
white Mancunian calico curtains can be seen as things and commodities
at once, those in Gaskell's Mary Barton become "available
for multiple translations and interpretations" (75), indicating
not only domesticity, but also "the history of the deindustrialization
of the Indian textile manufacture, and the rise to dominance of British
cotton production" (57) at the expense of slaves and laborers alike.
Through these curtains and other things -- "a pile of goods [that]
seems to gather in the margins of the text" (72) -- Freedgood tries
to recuperate meanings that, despite having been rendered unavailable
for present-day readers through what she terms "the social destruction
of meaning" and "interpretability" (68), nevertheless
survive "in textual form" and even in the "incidental
memory" of those still related to them by virtue of some sort of
personal experience or cultural heritage (69).

Chapter Three, "Realism, Fetishism, and Genocide," revolves
around Negro Head tobacco in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.
In comparison with what George Orwell condescendingly termed a characteristic
profusion of "unnecessary detail," Dickens's novels, for Freedgood,
are indeed old curiosity shops full of forgotten, dusty objects, ephemera,
and itemizations of necessary detail waiting for readers to establish
and pursue metonymic connections. Freedgood argues at length that this
variety of tobacco, a "highly desirable object" (91) in the
metropolis, is connected, among other encrypted social associations
that include slavery-related cultivation in the United States, with
black "Australian Aborigines" (83) and with how they were
massacred by white British settlers; therefore the horror of "Aboriginal
genocide" in Victorian Australia "cannot be named but only
be encoded fetishistically in the most apparently negligible of details"
(82). Freedgood investigates the history of tobacco "both as currency
and commodity" (92), especially through its advertisements in the
form of tobacco cards -- she includes four photographs (94-95) and the
Indian motif that presides over the volume on its flyleaf. In Great
Expectations, slavery is "neither distant nor exotic; it is
used as a metaphor for thoroughly British relations, and is very nearly
interchangeable with imprisonment and transportation" (97). Negro
Head tobacco serves, she maintains throughout, as a sort of ever-present,
albeit self-effacing, memorial, oscillating between the readers' historical
consciousness or unconsciousness of the fact and its repression, or
rather combining them all symbolically. Freedgood concludes this chapter
by clarifying the "metonymic sublime of the Dickens novel"
that is created by his disproportionate inventories and descriptions.
This marks a transition in her argument, inasmuch as Dickens's excess
somehow parodies the "ambitions and limitations of realism as a
hopeless project" of representation (105).

Chapter Four, "Toward a History of Literary Underdetermination,"
a study of George Eliot's Middlemarch, is not an isolated object;
rather, Freedgood approaches Middlemarch on the basis that it
reveals conscious authorial attempts at setting, restricting, and stabilizing
meaning against the symbolic, metonymic, or figural interpretive openness
of preceding Victorian novels. Eliot makes things take on metaphoric
meaning through long "hermeneutic displays" (6) which "restrict
and assign meaning to fictional objects"; the narrator "actively
dissuades readers from making meanings on their own" (6). Freedgood
holds Eliot's pedantic -- in its etymological sense -- procedure responsible
for blocking the strong metonymic -- literal and historical -- reading
of things Freedgood proposes in the preceding chapters. In her discussion
of the novel, she suggests that amid mounting awareness of uncertainty
and an abundance of "undiscriminating readers" and "undiscriminating
writers" (114), Eliot invents a self-contained literary novel that,
in consequence, paves the way for Modernism. Freedgood revisits the
sense of "poor dress," emeralds and Roman objects; in short,
she points out that Eliot translates moral and social ideas into things
(118) in a way that avows and disavows them simultaneously. In this
process of "standardization of literary meaning," "[a]llusion
becomes metonymy and then metaphor and then fetish"; in other words,
"the narrator works the allusion through to its rightful reduction"
to "an assigned quality" and the suppression of the rest (123).
Freedgood carefully analyzes how Eliot imposes her interpretations upon
readers, and she concludes the chapter by suggesting that a novel like
Middlemarch can "produce literariness and historicity together,"
and "make its meanings limited, legible, and reproducible,"
thus marking "a signal moment in the history of fugitive meaning"
(138).

Freedgood surveys the concept of Victorian thing culture in the final
section or "Coda." She sets it against the background of early
twenty-first century reading habits, and especially as a contrast to
the fetishism inherent in "commodity culture" (142) and industrialism,
somewhat taken for granted, as is often the case, by Marxist interpretations.
In accordance with her perspective, Freedgood means to "defetishize"
commodities, as the stresses and strains of this subsequent socio-cultural
tendency preclude further readings of the archive-like character of
mid-Victorian novels. Thing culture, she implies, also seems to survive
into the detective novel, as shown in Sherlock Holmes's fluent reading
of individual things as such, not as merely illegible material commodities
exposed to the danger of becoming metaphors (150-53). Incipient underdetermination
or stabilization of meaning can nevertheless be found in the last third
of the nineteenth century in the literary fiction of George Eliot and
Thomas Hardy, somehow blocking the previous right of recourse to strong
metonymic or literal reading (155), as is previously argued.

Elaine Freedgood examines objects meticulously by subjecting them to
a gradual process in which she moves from their unattended and apparently
meaningless literalness to their meaningful, overall metonymic relation
to the text and their extra-textual connections with subjects and histories
outside the narrative. This extremely instructive and readable contribution
to our understanding of things and the ideas they occlude should be
most appreciated insofar as it provokes fresh contemporary readings
of the Victorian novel. It only remains to observe the fruitful productivity
of this method in future interpretations of the "unread" things
and details of this and other nineteenth-century paradigms of realism,
no doubt abundantly laden as well with elusive meaning.

Works Cited

Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen
Crane, and the Economies of Play. Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University
Press, 1996.

---. "Thing Theory." Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001):
1-22.

---. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.